Timeline of chemistry

Timeline of chemistry lists important works, discoveries, ideas, inventions, and experiments that significantly changed mankind's understanding of the composition of matter and of the interactions thereof, the modern science known as chemistry. The history of chemistry in its modern form is often considered to begin with the English scientist Robert Boyle, though its roots can be traced back to the earliest recorded history.

Early ideas that later became incorporated into the modern science of chemistry come from two main sources. Natural philosophers such as Aristotle and Democritus used deductive reasoning in an attempt to explain the behavior of the world around them. Alchemists were people who used experimental techniques in an attempt to extend the life or perform material conversions, such as turning base metals into gold.

In the 17th century, a synthesis of the ideas of these two dissicplines, that is the deductive and the experimental, leads to the development of a process of thinking known as the scientific method. With the introduction of the scientific method, the modern science of chemistry was born.

Known as "the central science", the study of chemistry is strongly influenced by, and exerts a strong influence on, many other scientific and technological fields. Many events considered central to our modern understanding of chemistry are also considered key discoveries in such fields as physics, biology, astronomy, geology, and materials science to name a few.[1]

Contents

Pre-17th century

Prior to the acceptance of the scientific method and its application to the field of chemistry, it is somewhat controversial to consider many of the people listed below as "chemists" in the modern sense of the word. However, the ideas of certain great thinkers, either for their prescience, or for their wide and long-term acceptance, bears listing here.

c. 3000 BCE

Egyptians formulate the theory of the Ogdoad, or the “primordial forces”, from which all was formed. These were the elements of chaos, numbered in eight, that existed before the creation of the sun.[2]

Empedocles asserts that all things are composed of four primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water, whereby two active and opposing forces, love and hate, or affinity and antipathy, act upon these elements, combining and separating them into infinitely varied forms.[5]

c. 440 BCE

Leucippus and Democritus propose the idea of the atom, an indivisible particle that all matter is made of. This idea is largely rejected by natural philosophers in favor of the Aristotlean view.[6][7]

c. 360 BCE

Plato coins term ‘elements’ (stoicheia) and in his dialogue Timaeus, which includes a discussion of the composition of inorganic and organic bodies and is a rudimentary treatise on chemistry, assumes that the minute particle of each element had a special geometric shape: tetrahedron (fire), octahedron (air), icosahedron (water), and cube (earth).[8]

c. 350 BCE

Aristotle, expanding on Empedocles, proposes idea of a substance as a combination of matter and form. Describes theory of the Five Elements, fire, water, earth, air, and aether. This theory is largely accepted throughout the western world for over 1000 years.[9]

c. 50 BCE

Lucretius publishes De Rerum Natura, a poetic description of the ideas of Atomism.[10]

c. 300

Zosimos of Panopolis writes some of the oldest known books on alchemy, which he defines as the study of the composition of waters, movement, growth, embodying and disembodying, drawing the spirits from bodies and bonding the spirits within bodies.[11]

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (aka Rhazes) publishes several treatises on chemistry, including some of the earliest descriptions of controlled distillation and extraction methods. He also developed early method for the production of sulfuric acid.[15]

c. 1220

Robert Grosseteste publishes several Aristotelian commentaries where he lays out an early framework for the scientific method.[16]

c. 1267

Roger Bacon publishes Opus Maius, which among other things, proposes an early form of the scientific method, and contains results of his experiments with gunpowder.[17]

c. 1310

Pseudo-Geber, an anonymous Spanish alchemist who wrote under the name of Geber, publishes several books that establish the long-held theory that all metals were composed of various proportions of sulfur and mercury.[18]

René Descartes publishes Discours de la méthode, which contains an outline of the scientific method.[23]

1648

Posthumous publication of the book Ortus medicinae by Johann Baptista van Helmont, which is cited by some as a major transitional work between alchemy and chemistry, and as an important influence on Robert Boyle. The book contains the results of numerous experiments and establishes an early version of the Law of conservation of mass.[24]

1661

Robert Boyle publishes The Sceptical Chymist, a treatise on the distinction between chemistry and alchemy. It contains some of the earliest modern ideas of atoms, molecules, and chemical reaction, and marks the beginning of the history of modern chemistry.[25]

1662

Robert Boyle proposes Boyle's Law, an experimentally based description of the behavior of gases, specifically the relationship between pressure and volume.[25]

Antoine Lavoisier publishes Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, the first modern chemistry textbook. It is a complete survey of (at that time) modern chemistry, including the first concise definition of the law of conservation of mass, and thus also represents the founding of the discipline of stoichiometry or quantitative chemical analysis.[31][33]

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac collects and discovers several chemical and physical properties of air and of other gases, including experimental proofs of Boyle's and Charles's laws, and of relationships between density and composition of gases.[37]

1808

John Dalton publishes New System of Chemical Philosophy, which contains first modern scientific description of the atomic theory, and clear description of the law of multiple proportions.[36]

Friedrich Wöhler and Justus von Liebig perform the first confirmed discovery and explanation of isomers, earlier named by Berzelius. Working with cyanic acid and fulminic acid, they correctly deduce that isomerism was caused by differing arrangements of atoms within a molecular structure.[43]

Germain Hess proposes Hess's Law, an early statement of the Law of conservation of energy, which establishes that energy changes in a chemical process depend only on the states of the starting and product materials and not on the specific pathway taken between the two states.[44]

August Beer proposes Beer's law, which explains the relationship between the composition of a mixture and the amount of light it will absorb. Based partly on earlier work by Pierre Bouguer and Johann Heinrich Lambert, it establishes the analytical technique known as spectrophotometry.[48]

William Henry Perkin synthesizes Perkin's mauve, the first synthetic dye. Created as an accidental bi-product of an attempt to create quinine from coal tar. This discovery is the foundation of the dye synthesis industry, one of the earliest successful chemical industries.[50]

Stanislao Cannizzaro, resurrecting Avogadro's ideas regarding diatomic molecules, compiles a table of atomic weights and presents it at the 1860 Karlsruhe Congress, ending decades of conflicting atomic weights and molecular formulas, and leading to Mendeleev's discovery of the periodic law.[53]

1862

Alexander Parkes exhibits Parkesine, one of the earliest synthetic polymers, at the International Exhibition in London. This discovery formed the foundation of the modern plastics industry.[54]

Dmitri Mendeleev publishes the first modern periodic table, with the 66 known elements organized by atomic weights. The strength of his table was its ability to accurately predict the properties of as-yet unknown elements.[56][55]

Eugene Goldstein names the cathode ray, later discovered to be composed of electrons, and the canal ray, later discovered to be positive hydrogen ions that had been stripped of their electrons in a cathode ray tube. These would later be named protons.[66]

1893

Alfred Werner discovers the octahedral structure of cobalt complexes, thus establishing the field of coordination chemistry.[67]

1894-1898

William Ramsay discovers the noble gases, which fill a large and unexpected gap in the periodic table and led to models of chemical bonding.[68]

1897

Joseph John Thomson discovers the electron using the cathode ray tube.[69]

1898

Wilhelm Wien demonstrates that canal rays (streams of positive ions) can be defelected by magnetic fields, and that the amount of deflection is proportional to the mass-to-charge ratio. This discovery would lead to the analytical technique known as mass spectrometry.[70]

Antonius Van den Broek proposes the idea that the elements on the periodic table are more properly organized by positive nuclear charge rather than atomic weight.[80]

1911

The first Solvay Conference is held in Brussels, bringing together most of the most prominent scientists of the day. Conferences in physics and chemistry continue to be held periodically until today.[81]

1912

William Henry Bragg and William Lawrence Bragg propose Bragg's law and establish the field of X-ray crystallography, an important tool for elucidating the crystal structure of substances.[82]

Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segrè perform the first confirmed synthesis of technetium-97, the first artificially produced element, filling a gap in the periodic table. Though disputed, the element may have been synthesized as early as 1925 by Walter Noddack and others.[102]

1937

Eugene Houdry develops a method of industrial scale catalytic cracking of petroleum, leading to the development of the first modern oil refinery.[103]

1937

Pyotr Kapitsa, John Allen and Don Misener produce supercooled helium-4, the first zero-viscosity superfluid, a substance that displays quantum mechanical properties on a macroscopic scale.[104]

Linus Pauling publishes The Nature of the Chemical Bond, a compilation of a decades worth of work on chemical bonding. It is one of the most important modern chemical texts. It explains hybridization theory, covalent bonding and ionic bonding as explained through electronegativity, and resonance as a means to explain, among other things, the structure of benzene.[97]

Glenn T. Seaborg takes over McMillan's work creating new atomic nuclei. Pioneers method of neutron capture and later through other nuclear reactions. Would become the principal or co-discoverer of nine new chemical elements, and dozens of new isotopes of existing elements.[106]

1945

Jacob A. Marinsky, Lawrence E. Glendenin, and Charles D. Coryell perform the first confirmed synthesis of Promethium, filling in the last "gap" in the periodic table.[107]

Richard R. Ernst performs experiments that will lead to the development of the technique of Fourier Transform NMR. This would greatly increase the sensitivity of the technique, and open the door for magnetic resonance imaging or MRI.[114]

Sumio Iijima uses electron microscopy to discover a type of cylindrical fullerene known as a carbon nanotube, though earlier work had been done in the field as early as 1951. This material is an important component in the field of nanotechnology.[116]

1995

Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman produce the first Bose–Einstein condensate, a substance that displays quantum mechanical properties on the macroscopic scale.[117]

See also

References

^ Chemistry - The Central Science. The Chemistry Hall of Fame. York University. Retrieved on 2006-09-12.

^J. Gwyn Griffiths (1955). "The Orders of Gods in Greece and Egypt (According to Herodotus)". The Journal of Hellenic Studies75: 21-23. Retrieved on 2007-03-16.

^ Hoeller, Stephan A. (1996). On the Trail of the Winged God: Hermes and Hermeticism Throughout the Ages. Gnosis: A Journal of Western Inner Traditions (Vol. 40, Summer 1996). The Gnosis Archive. Retrieved on 2007-03-11.

^ Giese, Patsy Ann. Women in Science: 5000 Years of Obstacles and Achievements. SHiPS Resource Center for Sociology, History and Philosophy in Science Teaching. Retrieved on 2007-03-11.